Ted Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

By Chris Anderson

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A must-read insider’s guide to creating unforgettable speeches and changing people's minds.

Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview; it can be more powerful than anything in written form. This “invaluable guide” (Publishers Weekly) explains how the miracle of powerful public speaking is achieved, and equips you to give it your best shot. There is no set formula, but there are tools that can empower any speaker.

Since taking over TED in 2001, Chris Anderson has worked with all the TED speakers who have inspired us the most, and here he shares insights from such favorites as Sir Ken Robinson, Salman Khan, Monica Lewinsky, and more— everything from how to craft your talk’s content to how you can be most effective on stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780544664364

Chris Anderson

CHRIS ANDERSON is the curator of TED. Trained as a journalist after graduating from Oxford University, Anderson launched a number of successful magazines before turning his attention to TED, which he and his nonprofit acquired in 2001. His TED mantra—“ideas worth spreading”—continues to blossom on an international scale. He lives with his family in New York City.

Book preview

title page

Contents

---

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

The New Age of Fire

Foundation

Presentation Literacy

Idea Building

Common Traps

The Throughline

Talk Tools

Connection

Narration

Explanation

Persuasion

Revelation

Preparation Process

Visuals

Scripting

Run-Throughs

Open and Close

On Stage

Wardrobe

Mental Prep

Setup

Voice and Presence

Format Innovation

Reflection

Talk Renaissance

Why This Matters

Your Turn

Acknowledgments

Talks Referenced within the Book

Index

TED on the Web

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Footnotes

First Mariner Books edition 2017

Copyright © 2016 by Chris Anderson

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Anderson, Chris, date.

Title: TED talks : the official TED guide to public speaking / Chris Anderson.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048798 | ISBN 9780544634497 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544809710 (international edition pbk.) | ISBN 9781328710284 (pbk) | ISBN 9780544664364 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Public speaking—Handbooks, manuals, etc.

Classification: LCC PN4129.15 .A54 2016 | DDC 808.5/1—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048798

Cover design by Brian Moore

eISBN 978-0-544-66436-4

v3.0317

Inspired by Zoe Anderson (1986–2010).

Life is fleeting. Ideas, inspiration—and love—endure.

Prologue

The New Age of Fire

The house lights dim. A woman, her palms sweating, her legs trembling just a little, steps out onto the stage. A spotlight hits her face, and 1,200 pairs of eyes lock onto hers. The audience senses her nervousness. There is palpable tension in the room. She clears her throat and starts to speak.

What happens next is astounding.

The 1,200 brains inside the heads of 1,200 independent individuals start to behave very strangely. They begin to sync up. A magic spell woven by the woman washes over each person. They gasp together. Laugh together. Weep together. And as they do so, something else happens. Rich, neurologically encoded patterns of information inside the woman’s brain are somehow copied and transferred to the 1,200 brains in the audience. These patterns will remain in those brains for the rest of their lives, potentially impacting their behavior years into the future.

The woman on the stage is weaving wonder, not witchcraft. But her skills are as potent as any sorcery.

Ants shape each other’s behavior by exchanging chemicals. We do it by standing in front of each other, peering into each other’s eyes, waving our hands and emitting strange sounds from our mouths. Human-to-human communication is a true wonder of the world. We do it unconsciously every day. And it reaches its most intense form on the public stage.

The purpose of this book is to explain how the miracle of powerful public speaking is achieved, and to equip you to give it your best shot. But one thing needs emphasizing right at the start.

There is no one way to give a great talk. The world of knowledge is far too big and the range of speakers and of audiences and of talk settings is far too varied for that. Any attempt to apply a single set formula is likely to backfire. Audiences see through it in an instant and feel manipulated.

Indeed, even if there were a successful formula at one moment in time, it wouldn’t stay successful for long. That’s because a key part of the appeal of a great talk is its freshness. We’re humans. We don’t like same old, same old. If your talk feels too similar to a talk someone has already heard, it is bound to have less impact. The last thing we want is for everyone to sound the same or for anyone to sound as though he’s faking it.

So you should not think of the advice in this book as rules prescribing a single way to speak. Instead think of it as offering you a set of tools designed to encourage variety. Just use the ones that are right for you and for the speaking opportunity you’re facing. Your only real job in giving a talk is to have something valuable to say, and to say it authentically in your own unique way.

You may find it more natural than you think. Public speaking is an ancient art, wired deeply into our minds. Archaeological discoveries dating back hundreds of thousands of years have found community meeting sites where our ancestors gathered around fire. In every culture on earth, as language developed, people learned to share their stories, hopes, and dreams.

Imagine a typical scene. It is after nightfall. The campfire is ablaze. The logs crackle and spit under a starry sky. An elder rises, and all eyes turn and lock onto the wise, wrinkled face, illuminated by the flickering light. The story begins. And as the storyteller speaks, each listener imagines the events that are being described. That imagination brings with it the same emotions shared by the characters in the story. This is a profoundly powerful process. It is the literal alignment of multiple minds into a shared consciousness. For a period of time, the campfire participants act as if they were a single life form. They may rise together, dance together, chant together. From this shared backdrop, it is a short step to the desire to act together, to decide to embark together on a journey, a battle, a building, a celebration.

The same is true today. As a leader—or as an advocate—public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.

Indeed, the spoken word has actually gained new powers. Our campfire is now the whole world. Thanks to the Internet, a single talk in a single theater can end up being seen by millions of people. Just as the printing press massively amplified the power of authors, so the web is massively amplifying the impact of speakers. It is allowing anyone anywhere with online access (and within a decade or so, we can expect almost every village on earth to be connected) to summon the world’s greatest teachers to their homes and learn from them directly. Suddenly an ancient art has global reach.

This revolution has sparked a renaissance in public speaking. Many of us have suffered years of long, boring lectures at university; interminable sermons at church; or roll-your-eyes predictable political stump speeches. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form. Writing gives us the words. Speaking brings with it a whole new toolbox. When we peer into a speaker’s eyes; listen to the tone of her voice; sense her vulnerability, her intelligence, her passion, we are tapping into unconscious skills that have been fine-tuned over hundreds of thousands of years. Skills that can galvanize, empower, inspire.

What is more, we can enhance these skills in ways the ancients could never have imagined: The ability to show—right there in beautiful high-resolution—any image that a human can photograph or imagine. The ability to weave in video and music. The ability to draw on research tools that present the entire body of human knowledge to anyone in reach of a smartphone.

The good news is, these skills are teachable. They absolutely are. And that means that there’s a new superpower that anyone, young or old, can benefit from. It’s called presentation literacy. We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world may no longer be to write a letter to the editor or publish a book. It may be simply to stand up and say something . . . because both the words and the passion with which they are delivered can now spread across the world at warp speed.

In the twenty-first century, presentation literacy should be taught in every school. Indeed, before the era of books, it was considered an absolutely core part of education,¹ albeit under an old-fashioned name: rhetoric. Today, in the connected era, we should resurrect that noble art and make it education’s fourth R: reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic . . . and rhetoric.

The word’s core meaning is simply the art of speaking effectively. Fundamentally, that’s the purpose of this book. To recast rhetoric for the modern era. To offer useful stepping-stones toward a new presentation literacy.

Our experience at TED over the last few years can help point the way. TED began as an annual conference, bringing together the fields of technology, entertainment, and design (hence the name). But in recent years it has expanded to cover any topic of public interest. TED speakers seek to make their ideas accessible to those outside their field by delivering short, carefully prepared talks. And to our delight, this form of public speaking has proved a hit online, to the extent that, as of 2016, more than 1.5 billion TED Talks are viewed annually.

My colleagues and I have worked with hundreds of TED speakers, helping fine-tune their messages and how they deliver them. These amazing people have completely changed the way we see the world. Over the past decade, we have debated passionately among ourselves how exactly these speakers have achieved what they’ve achieved. From our lucky ringside seats, we have been intrigued and infuriated, informed and inspired. We have also had the chance to ask them directly for their advice on how to prepare and deliver an amazing talk. Thanks to their brilliance, we’ve learned dozens of insights into how they achieved something so extraordinary in just a few minutes.

That makes this book a collaborative effort. It’s a collaboration with those speakers, and with my talented colleagues, especially Kelly Stoetzel, Bruno Giussani, and Tom Rielly, who curate and host the main TED events with me, and who have had a central role over the years in shaping the TED Talk approach and format and bringing remarkable voices to our platform.

We have also tapped into the collective wisdom of thousands of self-organized TEDx events.² The content emerging from them often surprises and delights us, and it has expanded our understanding of what is possible in a public talk.

TED’s mission is to nurture the spread of powerful ideas. We don’t care whether this is done through something called TED, TEDx, or in any other form of public speaking. When we hear of other conferences deciding they want to put on TED-style talks, we’re thrilled. Ultimately, ideas aren’t owned. They have a life of their own. We’re delighted to see today’s renaissance in the art of public speaking wherever it is happening and whoever is doing it.

So the purpose of this book is not just to describe how to give a TED Talk. It’s much broader than that. Its purpose is to support any form of public speaking that seeks to explain, inspire, inform, or persuade; whether in business, education, or on the public stage. Yes, many of the examples in this book are from TED Talks, but that’s not only because those are the examples we’re most familiar with. TED Talks have generated a lot of excitement in recent years, and we think they have something to offer the wider world of public speaking. We think the principles that underlie them can act as a powerful basis for a broader presentation literacy.

So you won’t find specific tips on giving a toast at a wedding, or a company sales pitch, or a university lecture. But you will find tools and insights that may be useful for those occasions and, indeed, for every form of public speaking. More than that, we hope to persuade you to think about public speaking in a different way, a way that you will find exciting and empowering.

The campfires of old have spawned a new kind of fire. A fire that spreads from mind to mind, screen to screen: the ignition of ideas whose time has come.

This matters. Every meaningful element of human progress has happened only because humans have shared ideas with each other and then collaborated to turn those ideas into reality. From the first time our ancestors teamed up to take down a mammoth to Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, people have turned spoken words into astonishing shared achievements.

We need that now more than ever. Ideas that could solve our toughest problems often remain invisible because the brilliant people in whose minds they reside lack the confidence or the know-how to share those ideas effectively. That is a tragedy. At a time when the right idea presented the right way can ripple across the world at the speed of light, spawning copies of itself in millions of minds, there’s huge benefit to figuring out how best to set it on its way, both for you, the speaker-in-waiting, and for the rest of us who need to know what you have to say.

Are you ready?

Let’s go light a fire.

Chris Anderson

November 2016

Foundation

Foundation

1

Presentation Literacy

The Skill You Can Build

You’re nervous, right?

Stepping out onto a public stage and having hundreds of pairs of eyes turned your way is terrifying. You dread having to stand up in a company meeting and present your project. What if you get nervous and stumble over your words? What if you completely forget what you were going to say? Maybe you’ll be humiliated! Maybe your career will crater! Maybe the idea you believe in will stay buried forever!

These are thoughts that can keep you up at night.

But guess what? Almost everyone has experienced the fear of public speaking. Indeed, surveys that ask people to list their top fears often report public speaking as the most widely selected, ahead of snakes, heights—and even death.

How can this be? There is no tarantula hidden behind the microphone. You have zero risk of plunging off the stage to your death. The audience will not attack you with pitchforks. Then why the anxiety?

It’s because there’s a lot at stake—not just the experience in the moment, but in our longer-term reputation. How others think of us matters hugely. We are profoundly social animals. We crave each other’s affection, respect, and support. Our future happiness depends on these realities to a shocking degree. And we sense that what happens on a public stage is going to materially affect these social currencies for better or worse.

But with the right mindset, you can use your fear as an incredible asset. It can be the driver that will persuade you to prepare for a talk properly.

That’s what happened when Monica Lewinsky came to TED. For her, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Seventeen years earlier, she had been through the most humiliating public exposure imaginable, an experience so intense it almost broke her. Now she was attempting a return to a more visible public life, to reclaim her narrative.

But she was not an experienced public speaker, and she knew that it would be disastrous if she messed up. She told me:

Nervous is too mild a word to describe how I felt. More like . . . Gutted with trepidation. Bolts of fear. Electric anxiety. If we could have harnessed the power of my nerves that morning, I think the energy crisis would have been solved. Not only was I stepping out onto a stage in front of an esteemed and brilliant crowd, but it was also videotaped, with the high likelihood of being made public on a widely viewed platform. I was visited by the echoes of lingering trauma from years of having been publicly ridiculed. Plagued by a deep insecurity I didn’t belong on the TED stage. That was the inner experience against which I battled.

And yet Monica found a way to turn that fear around. She used some surprising techniques, which I’ll share in chapter 15. Suffice it to say, they worked. Her talk won a standing ovation at the event, rocketed to a million views within a few days, and earned rave reviews online. It even prompted a public apology to her from a longtime critic, feminist author Erica Jong.

The brilliant woman I am married to, Jacqueline Novogratz, was also haunted by fear of public speaking. In school, at college, and into her twenties, the prospect of a microphone and watching eyes was so scary it was debilitating. But she knew that to advance her work fighting poverty, she would have to persuade others, and so she just began forcing herself to do it. Today she gives scores of speeches every year, often earning standing ovations.

Indeed, everywhere you look, there are stories of people who were terrified of public speaking but found a way to become really good at it, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Warren Buffett to Princess Diana, who was known to all as shy Di and hated giving speeches, but found a way to speak informally in her own voice, and the world fell in love with her.

If you can get a talk right, the upside can be amazing. Take the talk that entrepreneur Elon Musk gave to SpaceX employees on August 2, 2008.

Musk was not known as a great public speaker. But that day, his words marked an important turning point for his company. SpaceX had already suffered two failed launches. This was the day of the third launch, and everyone knew failure could force the company’s closure. The Falcon rocket soared off the launch pad, but right after the first stage fell away, disaster struck. The spacecraft exploded. The video feed went dead. Some 350 employees had gathered and, as described by Dolly Singh, the company’s head of talent acquisition, the mood was thick with despair. Musk emerged to speak to them. He told them they’d always known it would be hard, but that despite what had happened, they had already accomplished something that day that few nations, let alone companies, had achieved. They had successfully completed the first stage of a launch and taken a spacecraft to outer space. They simply had to pick themselves up and get back to work. Here’s how Singh described the talk’s climax:

Then Elon said, with as much fortitude and ferocity as he could muster after having been awake for like 20+ hours by this point, For my part, I will never give up and I mean never. I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that. It was the most impressive display of leadership that I have ever witnessed. Within moments the energy of the building went from despair and defeat to a massive buzz of determination as people began to focus on moving forward instead of looking back.

That’s the power of a single talk. You might not be leading an organization, but a talk can still open new doors or transform a career.

TED speakers have told us delightful stories of the impact of their talks. Yes, there are sometimes book and movie offers, higher speaking fees, and unexpected offers of financial support. But the most appealing stories are of ideas advanced, and lives changed. Amy Cuddy gave a hugely popular talk about how changing your body language can raise your confidence level. She has had more than 15,000 messages from people around the world, telling her how that wisdom has helped them.

And young Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba’s inspiring talk about building a windmill in his village as a fourteen-year-old sparked a series of events that led to him being accepted into an engineering program at Dartmouth College.

THE DAY TED MIGHT HAVE DIED

Here’s a story from my own life: When I first took over leadership of TED in late 2001, I was reeling from the near collapse of the company I had spent fifteen years building, and I was terrified of another huge public failure. I had been struggling to persuade the TED community to back my vision for TED, and I feared that it might just fizzle out. Back then, TED was an annual conference in California, owned and hosted by a charismatic architect named Richard Saul Wurman, whose larger-than-life presence infused every aspect of the conference. About eight hundred people attended every year, and most of them seemed resigned to the fact that TED probably couldn’t survive once Wurman departed. The TED conference of February 2002 was the last one to be held under his leadership, and I had one chance and one chance only to persuade TED attendees that the conference would continue just fine. I had never run a conference before, however, and despite my best efforts over several months at marketing the following year’s event, only seventy people had signed up for it.

Early on the last morning of that conference, I had 15 minutes to make my case. And here’s what you need to know about me: I am not naturally a great speaker. I say um and you know far too often. I will stop halfway through a sentence, trying to find the right word to continue. I can sound overly earnest, soft-spoken, conceptual. My quirky British sense of humor is not always shared by others.

I was so nervous about this moment, and so worried that I would look awkward on the stage, that I couldn’t even bring myself to stand. Instead I rolled forward a chair from the back of the stage, sat on it, and began.

I look back at that talk now and cringe—a lot. If I were critiquing it today, there are a hundred things I would change, starting with the wrinkly white T-shirt I was wearing. And yet . . . I had prepared carefully what I wanted to say, and I knew there were at least some in the audience desperate for TED to survive. If I could just give those supporters a reason to get excited, perhaps they would turn things around. Because of the recent dot-com bust, many in the audience had suffered business losses as bad as my own. Maybe I could connect with them that way?

I spoke from the heart, with as much openness and conviction as I could summon. I told people I had just gone through a massive business failure. That I’d come to think of myself as a complete loser. That the only way I’d survived mentally was by immersing myself in the world of ideas. That TED had come to mean the world to me—that it was a unique place where ideas from every discipline could be shared. That I would do all in my power to preserve its best values. That, in any case, the conference had brought such intense inspiration and learning to us that we couldn’t possibly let it die . . . could we?

Oh, and I broke the tension with an apocryphal anecdote about France’s Madame de Gaulle and how she shocked guests at a diplomatic dinner by expressing her desire for "a

Reviews for Ted Talks

[drfuriosa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent, practical guide to success in public speaking. I will be using this as my textbook for the Communications class I will be teaching in the spring.

[scottjpearson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I grew up paying attention to my school teachers and to Southern Baptist preachers. There was a gap in what I heard. I heard lots of reason-based presentations at school. I learned in detail how the world worked (nature and humanity). I learned to think, to question, and to present myself as a reasonable human being.

However, at church, I learned something different. I learned the art of rhetoric. While at school, I learned how to evaluate an argument, at church, I learned how to make an argument. To present myself in a manner that worked with normal people. School taught me the dignified way of presentation; church taught me the effective way of presentation.

I hate to say it, but there's a difference. My schooling did not teach me leadership - to be effective. It did teach me efficiency - something my church pastors could have learned.

Fortunately, the TED program (as described in this book) is both effective and efficient in its aims. In it, I reminded myself of public-speaking principles for effective presentations. I learned about new, innovative ways of connecting with my audiences.

Most importantly, I learned ways that people are excited about transforming the world through thoughtful presentations. Example after example were drawn from real TED Talks about how to present effectively and efficiently. I was inspired over and over again while I honed my public speaking skills.

As the old saying goes, the world will marvel as you do common things in an uncommon way. This book definitely achieved that. Public speaking was refreshed as leadership in communication was inspired. Good rhetoric was taught. I recommend it to anyone who seeks to connect better with their fellow humans.

[theo.scholiadis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book, with some very good suggestions about how to present a speech or a talk. What's even better is that it is written by the CEO of TED, who helps actual TED speakers improve their talks.A must read for planning your talks and presentations.

[cathishaw · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Anyone who has spoken to me in the last six months knows I love this book. I’ve been raving about it seen I first discovered it last fall.I’ve been a TED fan for years but my interest in Anderson’s book goes beyond the TED experience to how I can incorporate his suggestions into my communications classes at UBC.Overwhelmingly, I’ve seen students at every level ask for more instruction on public speaking. And while almost all my classes incorporate a formal presentation as part of the requirements, I’ve noticed that I’m not seeing a lot of improvement in student public speaking skills.What Anderson talks about in this book is integral to the TED experience: making a talk worth sharing. Telling a story. Making it clear that you have something important to share with an audience who can benefit from hearing it. And this is the most difficult part for my students. Identifying what is important in their work.I’ve been teaching a research writing course to graduate students in Engineering for almost a year now. I’ve seen three different classes of grad students share their writing with me. At the end of each course, students must create a short (5-minute) presentation about their research. And this is difficult for them. The audience is comprised of other graduate students and myself. An educated audience. But we all have varied levels of expertise. Because their research is usually very specialized, they must make it understandable and accessible to myself (an academic from a different discipline) and their classmates (academics from different sub-disciplines; what a mechanical engineering MA student studies is very different than what a civil engineering PhD student studies).The research these students are engaging in is fascinating and varied. But identifying the piece in their research that is compelling to a wider audience is a challenge. Anderson’s book gives a lot of tips for doing just that. In addition, he illustrates those tips with examples from all different kinds of TED talks. Then he challenges the reader to use similar techniques to create powerful presentations.I’ve bought the e-book, the audio book, and the print copy of this work and I then asked our UBC Librarian to order a copy for students to borrow. So you know I’m going to strongly recommend it. If you want to improve any kind of public speaking, check out Anderson’s book!

[addunn3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you plan to do some public speaking, no matter the venue, this book is well worth your time. Tips on organization, tactics for better communicating your thoughts, and many tips on presentation methods.

[daniel5estes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

TED Talks starts out a little too fluffy and feel-good-y. It's not until Chapter 3, "Common Traps," where things get more practical starting with the four don'ts: No sales pitches, no rambling, no boring your audience with how great your office/organization/team is, and no substituting style for substance thinking no one will notice. Each of these shares a commonality which is discussed in the chapter and that is TED-level presentations are about giving, not taking. The root fault of the four types of bad speeches is a presenter taking the audiences time and attention while giving little or nothing in return.

[tgraettinger_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book on public speaking and especially the "TED way" - which really is simply to present a great idea.